The Real Life Downton Abbey: How Life Was Really Lived in Stately Homes a Century Ago

Fans of Julian Fellowes's Downton Abbey can visit the privileged world of the English aristocrat from a century ago in this social history of the Edwardian period. Using the characters and setting of the popular television show as a point of reference for the reader, Jacky Hyams portrays these lords and ladies as the super-rich of their times, pampered and catered to by an army of butlers, servants, footmen, housekeepers, and grooms. Class, inheritance, titles, and snobbery dominated the lives of the upper class, while below stairs the staff inhabited a completely different world of drudgery and well-mannered service. Rubbing shoulders with wealth and privilege, they were privy to the most intimate and darkest secrets of their masters, yet were certain to face ruin and shame if they stepped outside the strict boundaries of their world.